Philip Kerr - A Quiet Flame

“What about conscience?”

I let the gun lie flat on my hand for a moment. “Maybe you’d feel better if I put this away.”

“No,” she said quickly.

“So it’s all right if I have to kill someone, just as long as your conscience is clear, is that it?”

“Maybe if I was as tough as you, I could do it. I mean, shoot someone. But I’m not.”

“Angel? If there’s one thing the last war proved it’s that anyone can kill anyone. All you need is a reason. And a gun.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“There are no murderers,” I said. “There are just plumbers and shopkeepers and lawyers who kill people. Everyone’s quite normal until they pull the trigger. That’s all you need to fight a war. Lots of ordinary people to kill lots of other ordinary people. Couldn’t be easier.”

“And that makes it all right?”

“No. But that’s the way it is.”

She said nothing to that, and for a while, we walked in silence, as if the preternaturally quiet forest had affected us in some way. There was just a light breeze in the treetops and the sound of twigs cracking under our feet to remind us of where we were. Then, emerging from the trees, we found ourselves facing a second wire fence. It was about two hundred meters long, and behind it stood a number of temporary-looking wooden buildings. At opposite ends of the fence were watchtowers and, fortunately for us, these were not manned. The camp, if camp this was, looked deserted. I took out the wire cutters.

“Melville called this place Dulce,” I said, snipping one length of the little Scotsman’s galvanized wire, and then another.

“Someone’s idea of a joke, perhaps,” said Anna. “There’s nothing sweet about it.”

“It’s my guess that this is where they held illegal Jewish immigrants like your aunt and uncle, and Isabel Pekerman’s sisters. That’s the assumption I’ve been working on, anyway.”

We ducked through the wire and into the camp.

I counted five watchtowers-one on each corner of the perimeter fence and a fifth in the center of the camp, overlooking a kind of trench that seemed to connect one long barrack to another. Near the main gate was a small guardhouse. A road led into the camp from the main gate and onto what looked like a parade ground. In the center of the parade ground was an empty flagpole. Nearest to the place where we had entered the camp was a large ranch house. We peered through the dusty windows. There was furniture: tables, chairs, an old radio, a picture of Juan Peron, a room with a dozen or so beds on which the mattresses had been rolled up. In a canteen-sized kitchen, pots and pans hung neatly on a wall-mounted rack. I tried the door, and found it was not locked.

We went inside, breathing a musty, mildewed air. On a table we found an old copy of La Prensa. On the front page was a picture of Peron wearing a military uniform, a white officer’s cap, white gloves, a sash in the colors of the Argentine national flag, and a big, generous grin. The lead story was something about Peron announcing his first five-year plan to boost the country’s newly nationalized industries. I showed it to Anna, pointing out the date.

“Nineteen forty-seven,” I said. “I guess that was the last time anyone was here.”

“I certainly hope so,” she said.

I walked into another room and picked up an old helmet. Other rooms were no more enlightening.

“This must have been where the soldiers relaxed,” I said.

We went outside again, crossing the parade ground to a group of four long barracks. We went inside one. It was like a stable, except that instead of stalls there were wide wooden shelves, some of which were covered with handfuls of straw, and almost a minute had passed before I realized that these were supposed to be beds. Probably two or three people could have been accommodated on each of the shelves.

Anna looked at me with pain in her eyes, and I could tell she had arrived at the same conclusion. Neither of us spoke. She stayed close to me and eventually took my left hand. My gun was still in my right. We went into the second barrack, which was much like the first. So was the third. I was reminded of the POW camp I had been held in by the Russians. Apart from the weather, this place looked almost grim.

The fourth building was just a long, empty shed. The far end of the shed led down into a sort of trench that was covered with a ceiling of more barbed wire. The trench was about thirty yards long and two yards wide. We entered it and walked down into a barrack that you knew was there only when you had entered the trench. This one was divided into three chambers by two wooden walls. Each chamber was about ten feet high and thirty feet wide, and the inside walls were covered with sheets of zinc. On the ceiling were shower pipes. The door of each chamber was extra thick and could be closed from the outside by an iron locking bar. These doors were sealed with rubber gaskets around the edges. In each of the three chambers, a copper pipe entered through a wall a few inches above a tiled floor. The pipes were all connected to a large central stove in the corridor outside the chambers. By now I had a very bad feeling about this place.

Anna was looking at the pipes on the ceiling. “So where did the water come from?” she asked, glancing around. “I didn’t see a water tank on the roof.”

“Perhaps they took it away,” I said.

“Why? They haven’t taken anything else away.” She glanced down at the floor. “And what are these? Tram rails? What?” She followed the tram rails to the far end of the barrack and some double doors next to a big extractor fan set in the wall. She pushed open the doors and went outside.

“Perhaps we should leave now,” I called out, going after her. I holstered my gun and tried to take her by the hand, but she lifted it away and kept on walking.

“Not until I understand what this place is,” she said.

I tried to inject some calm into my voice. “Come on, Anna. Let’s go.” I wondered how much she knew of what had gone on at the camps in Poland. “We’ve seen enough, don’t you think? They’re not here. Perhaps they never were.”

The rails led along the side of five grass-covered mounds about twenty feet wide and forty feet long. Next to these were a number of heavy-duty flatbed trolleys of the kind that might have been used in a railway yard. The trolleys were covered in rust, but the design was clear enough: each trolley could be raised to tip its cargo into one of the pits. And I was beginning to suspect what probably lay underneath the grass-covered mounds.

“Earthworks,” I said.

“Earthworks? No, I don’t think so.”

“Yes,” I said. “I expect they were going to build some more of these barracks and then changed their minds.”

It sounded pathetic. I knew perfectly well what I was looking at. And by now, so did she.

Slowly, Anna was bending forward to look at something on the grass-covered mound that had caught her eye. She started to crouch. Then she was on her knees, glancing around, finding a piece of wood and using it to scrape at the ground around an almost colorless plant that was growing out of the pit in front of her.

“What is it?” I asked, coming closer. “Have you found something?”

She sat back on her haunches and I saw that it wasn’t a plant at all, but a child’s hand-a decomposed, partly skeletal human hand. Anna shook her head, whispered something, and then, putting her hand to her mouth, tried to stifle the emotion rising in her throat. Then she crossed herself.

I said nothing. There was nothing I could say. The purpose of the camp was now clear to us both. These mounds were mass graves.

“How many, do you think?” she said finally. “In each one?”